Yahoo Search Improvements

clipped from tech.yahoo.com Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results (PC World) Yahoo's lab in India is developing technology that will summarize information about web search results rather than simply offer links as search engines currently do. clipped from bangalore.yahoo.com clipped from tech.yahoo.com The Bangalore lab is working in the area of automated information extraction, which involves going into the URLs, going through billions of pages, and extracting the relevant information, he said. If it is a product page, users will typically get abstracts that include an image of the product, the name of the manufacturer, and the price, Rastogi said. Likewise a link to a hotel would have its address, telephone number, maybe a map guiding users to the hotel, and the rating of the hotel, he added. Yahoo made available to developers earlier this year SearchMonkey, a platform that it said would allow developers and site owners to customize the presentation of URLs in search results.

clipped from developer.yahoo.com

SearchMonkey

SearchMonkey is Yahoo! Search's new open platform.

Using SearchMonkey, developers and site owners can use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.

clipped from tech.yahoo.com

"Clearly we don't expect that everybody will adopt SearchMonkey, so this 'rich results' piece is our in-house effort to automate the information extraction for large classes of web sites," Rastogi said.

Search query refinement

The Bangalore lab is also working with other Yahoo labs in the area of search query refinement.

If a user types in "cars", he could be at various stages in the purchase cycle for a car, or is maybe looking for a car mechanic, or wants to rent a car, Rastogi said.

Related:
Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results (PC World) by PC World: Yahoo! Tech
Yahoo! Bangalore
SearchMonkey - YDN
Yahoo Search To Offer Abstracts of Search Results, Determine Intent - ReadWriteWeb
Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results - PC World